“I’m complying with his request, of course.”
“You’re what?”
“I’ve given him all the transmissions we intercepted in the D.C. area on the night in question-verbal, e-mail, and text. The legal intercepts, that is.” Dillon laughed. “Drexler had no idea how much information he was asking for. I’ve buried the poor fellow in electronic files and paper. Then, to make his job even harder, I’ve told him we’re behind schedule transcribing some of the conversations we’ve recorded-I didn’t tell him the computers do most of the transcribing-so he’s going to have to listen to hours of garbled, barely audible transmissions. It’ll take Mr. Drexler weeks to review everything I’ve given him.”
“I don’t get it, Dillon. Why would Drexler even think you’d give him an illegal intercept, whether it was related to Russo or any other case?”
“He may think he swooped down on us so fast that we wouldn’t have time to separate the legal from the illegal. But I suspect Mr. Drexler knows it’s unlikely that the Russo intercept is lying in the stacks of files I’ve given him. I think this is just his opening salvo, and what he’s doing is getting the lay of the land. He’s trying to figure out how we operate and who does what, and what he’s really looking for is the people who might have listened to a transmission of Russo being killed.”
“Then he’s wasting his time. He’ll never identify the techs who work for me by reviewing authorized wire taps and, if by some fluke he did, none of them would talk.”
“If Mr. Drexler asked them politely, I’m sure they wouldn’t, Claire. But how long do you think the redoubtable Gilbert would resist if somebody connected a car battery to his-uh-manly appendage?”
Claire reluctantly nodded her head in agreement. A couple of bitch slaps to the head, and Gilbert would give up his own mother.
“So what are we going to do?”
“I’ll keep an eye on Mr. Drexler,” Dillon said. “What you need to do, and quickly, is figure out why Russo was killed and who ordered the killing.”
“I know that!” Claire snapped. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”
“I also think you need to do a little research on Mr. Drexler. A friend of mine has given me reason to believe that there might be a skeleton or two lurking in his closet.”
“Okay,” Claire said, rising from her chair, anxious to be on her way.
“Oh, and one other thing,” Dillon said. “Your idea to use Mr. DeMarco? I think you should proceed with that.”
Claire Whiting wasn’t the type to pump her fist into the air and shout, “Yes!” She simply nodded her head but Dillon saw the gleam in her eyes. She made him think of a cat creeping up on an inattentive canary.
23
“This is Joseph DeMarco, Agent Hopper, and I wanted you to know that-”
“No, no!” Claire said. “You have the voice down, the New York accent and all, but the… the tone is wrong. He’s not so formal. He’s sort of laid back. And if he was pissed, it’d be more like: Hey, Hopper, this is DeMarco, and I just found out-Do you understand?”
“I guess,” the impersonator said. He could imitate almost anyone, including most females. At Christmas parties, after a couple of drinks, he’d do an impression of the president and his wife talking after sex that was so funny that even Claire laughed. At this point she didn’t know what she wanted him to tell Hopper but, when she did know, she wanted the impersonator to be ready.
“Go practice some more,” she said.
Claire needed to spook Hopper.
She needed to make him run, literally, to whoever was controlling him and the best way she could think to do that and keep the agency’s involvement secret was to use DeMarco. If she could get Hopper to meet his boss, that would be ideal. The other possibility was that Hopper would call his boss and his boss would decide to do something about DeMarco. They-whomever Hopper was working with-had already killed Russo and most likely the reporter, Hansen. They’d kill DeMarco, too, if they had to. So she would put people on DeMarco and when they tried to kill him or snatch him, she’d follow whoever was assigned-and try to protect DeMarco as best she could.
DeMarco. Again, records could only tell you so much, but the impression she had was: average guy, maybe below — average guy. He was a lawyer and had passed the Virginia bar, but had never practiced law. He was a GS-13-a rank that wasn’t all that impressive in D.C.-and had been one for a long time, meaning that his career had most likely stalled. He had an office in the subbasement of the Capitol-the location of his office another indicator that he wasn’t a power player-but he wasn’t on the staff of any member of the House or Senate. So she couldn’t figure out exactly what he did but finally decided it didn’t really matter. He was just some sort of low-level legal weenie stuck in a dead-end job.
As for his personal life, nothing leaped out at her. He’d been married once, divorced about six years ago, and the divorce had cost him a bundle. He lived in a townhouse on P Street in Georgetown; the house wasn’t all that big but the mortgage was enormous. He drove a mid-sized Japanese car, didn’t appear to cheat on his taxes, and didn’t gamble online or spend hours looking at porn sites on the Internet.
The only thing unusual about him was his father. Gino DeMarco had been a button man for Carmine Taliaferro, an old-time Mafia guy in Queens. Taliaferro died from cancer a few years ago, and Gino DeMarco died from lead poisoning-three bullets in the chest. She supposed it was possible that Joe DeMarco, like his father, could have connections to organized crime, but based on his bank statements and his lifestyle, she didn’t think so.
She looked at his photo again. He was a good-looking guy: a full head of dark hair, a prominent nose, blue eyes, and a big square chin with a dimple in it. Good-looking, yet at the same time hard-looking. It was most likely her imagination, and probably because of what she knew about his father, but she could picture him in a Scorsese movie playing a knee-breaker working for a loan shark. And there was something in his eyes: toughness, stubbornness, something that made her think, If you pushed him, he’d push back.
Then she laughed, thinking that if the NSA was doing the pushing, it wouldn’t matter how hard he pushed back.
Another of Claire’s agents-a guy, skinny, droopy-eyed like he was always on the verge of falling asleep-was slumped in a chair in front of Claire’s desk, sitting more on the base of his spine than on his butt. Claire thought about telling him to sit up straight, but she wasn’t his mother-or anyone else’s mother-and never would be.
“I want this guy’s house and car bugged and I want a GPS tracking device installed on his car,” she said, handing the agent the slim file on DeMarco. “But I also want him bugged, and I want it done tonight. He’s got a cell phone, and he probably has it on him all the time. So bug the phone and put a GPS chip in it, too, so we always know where he is. And his belts. Bug them.” She paused for a beat, then said, “Use the gas.”
A few years ago, Chechen terrorists invaded a theater in Moscow and took a few hundred people hostage. The Russian government responded by shooting nerve gas into the theater, the idea being that the gas would knock everybody out-the Chechens and their hostages-and then the Russians could just walk in and scoop up the bad guys. The only problem was that the gas killed more than a hundred people, mostly hostages.
The United States, not to be outdone in any sort of weaponry, had a similar gas. There were, however, a couple of problems. The first was that the gas wasn’t particularly fast-acting, taking about ten minutes before it incapacitated the gasee, which wasn’t really a problem when it came to DeMarco. Claire’s droopy-eyed agent would wait until DeMarco was in bed, slip into his house wearing a gas mask, release the gas, then wait ten minutes and do what he needed to do. The next morning, DeMarco would wake up with the mother of all hangovers but would be otherwise healthy. Unless, of course, he was allergic to one of the ingredients in the gas, which about one person in ten thousand was, and if this was the case he wouldn’t ever wake up. That was the second problem with the gas.